Everything went better than expected

We had some interesting traffic yesterday. Usually that would mean it’s time for a technobabbly post-mortem about which part of our infrastructure failed and caused the site to go down for three hours. However, something strange happened this time: the site didn’t go down(knock on wood). So I guess we’re going to have to set aside tradition and instead make a, um.. “postpartem” blog post about how things bent but did not break.

To understand the storm we weathered, take a look at our impressions-served-per-hour over the past week:

It the past, we were always operating just around peak capacity, and never could have survived an unexpected surge like that. Still, it wasquite a ride — it actually jammed up our internal traffic tracker for a while (sorry if the per-community traffic totals are a bit laggy for the next few days).

Google Analytics confirms our numbers, which is always nice:

We’re happy to see that despite all these newcomers (one out of every four visitors yesterday), our overall time-on-site-per-visitor averaged out to a very respectable 11 minutes, 42 seconds. You guys didn’t just take a quick peek and leave; you stuck around for a bit and took the tour. And a bunch of you must have liked what you saw, because a ton of you went ahead and created accounts:

Oh, one more thing: Since we don’t want redditors to think of the ad box as “The Box of Hate Which I Never, Ever Look At”, we’ve been occasionally sticking little games in there, and as of today, pictures of cute little animals. If you’re running AdBlock and sad about all the fun you’re missing, here’s how to make an exception for reddit.